Three cheers for two women

Thursday

This Sunday, hundreds of people will gather on Commercial Street to help raise money for an organization founded by two former Provincetown residents, Molly Perdue and Melanie Braverman.

These women, who now live in Brewster, reacted to their experience of caring for Perdue’s mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, by forming a family support group to help others in similar circumstances.

Now just four years old, the nonprofit Alzheimer’s Family Support Center of Cape Cod employs 17 people and holds support groups for caregivers and for people living with Alzheimer’s disease. They help with insurance and offer expert advice on how to live life after a diagnosis. Since a person with Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia can live for many years, some training and tips can make a huge difference.

Perdue and Braverman deserve to be celebrated for many reasons. But during Women’s Week, their contributions to a rapidly graying Cape Cod are especially worth mentioning. Women take on most of the care for Alzheimer’s patients. According to the national Alzheimer’s Association, approximately two-thirds of caregivers are female, usually daughters and wives.

It isn’t an easy job, nor is it well paid.

About 30 to 40 percent of family caregivers of people with dementia suffer from depression, compared with five to 17 percent of non-caregivers of similar ages, according to the national Alzheimer’s group. The prevalence of depression is higher among dementia caregivers than even those who care for people with schizophrenia (20 percent) or stroke (19 percent).

Family members are not compensated for their caregiving time, though they often need to reduce their work hours or give up their jobs altogether. The 15.9 million family and other caregivers of people with dementia provided about 18.2 billion hours of unpaid care. With this work valued at $12.65 an hour, the estimated economic value nationwide comes to $230 billion, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

“Caregivers who are women may experience higher levels of burden, depression and impaired health than men, with evidence suggesting that these differences arise because female caregivers tend to spend more time caregiving, to take on more caregiving tasks, and to care for someone with more cognitive, functional and/or behavior problems,” the Alzheimer’s Association states.

Caregiving itself is not a disease, so only when caregivers become ill, often because they neglect their own needs, do insurers compensate them for its costs. The value of these services cannot really be expressed in dollars — keeping a loved one safe and comfortable in the last years of life is both priceless and a tremendously selfless act.

Braverman and Perdue recognized the importance of this work. And that’s what we’d like to do as well, though words only go so far.

Women’s work is still undervalued, both in the form of a paycheck and in people’s minds. We often celebrate accomplishments that are male-dominated. Only 25 of the Fortune 500 companies have female chief executive officers. Only eight percent of Hollywood directors are women, according to Women in Hollywood.

And yet this work done without fanfare or pay is beyond important. We hope the #MeToo movement will help us recognize other ways in which women are still not given equal voice, though they so richly deserve it.